Today, Zoho takes its journey into enterprise software prolificacy a step further, introducing Zoho Flow, a Zapier -inspired tool designed to create flexible workflows between cloud apps. The company has also unveiled Zoho PageSense, a website optimization tool that lets you track how users visit and navigate your website. Zoho has also relaunched Zoho Site, its website builder, to give users a more modern and dynamic way to build an online business.

In this article, we’ll examine the three solutions and how they fit into the Zoho One ecosystem. We spoke with Zoho Chief Evangelist Raju Vegesna about the releases, what makes them stand out in the industry, and why they’re important to Zoho’s operations.

1
Zoho Flow

When you think of Zoho Flow, it’s difficult to not draw an immediate comparison to Zapier . Both tools are designed to integrate disparate platforms to create workflows that automatically pull data back and forth between systems. Like Zapier, Zoho Flow, which is part of the Zoho One ecosystem, requires little-to-no coding experience to help build these cross-solution integrations.

Like Zapier, Zoho Flow offers a set of pre-built workflow templates that you can activate just by entering your credentials for all of the relevant accounts. You connect apps by dragging and dropping them into the builder. From there, you can make edits to the workflow and rearrange actions as you see fit. Think of it this way: If you want your CRM data to feed into Zoho Campaigns to trigger a welcome email to a new customer, then you can create a “Flow” to produce this exact automation by dragging and dropping the two apps into one workflow environment.

Each Flow must consist of a trigger (a new customer is entered in the CRM system) and one or more actions (a welcome email is sent from Zoho Campaigns to the customer). The functions can also be used to add branching, time-based actions, and more. So, if your customer deletes the welcome email, then the branching could trigger a third action (remove from mailing list). Or you can set the solution to wait three weeks for the customer to respond before initiating another action.

Additionally, you can code custom functions by using Zoho's own programming language, which has 500 millions lines of code written by over 50,000 programmers, the company said in a statement. Zoho Flow also features a dashboard that gives you insights into how your workflows are performing and what you may want to tweak to maximize your automation efforts.

"Integration is a challenge," said Vegesna. "Flow is not just for Zoho application integration but for external applications as well."

When asked why Flow would be able to attract users over tools such as Zapier, Vegesna said Flow's visual drag-and-drop approach and its emphasis on workflow branching make it a unique offering in the market.

Zoho Flow’s app ecosystem consists of about 90 different tools and more than 200 Flow templates. In addition to a free plan, Zoho Flow offers paid subscriptions starting at $10 per organization per month.

2
Zoho PageSense

Zoho also launched Zoho PageSense, a website optimization tool that you can use to modify and test your site architecture to drive more visits and sales. PageSense tracks things such as visitor behavior patterns, A/B testing, forecasting, heat maps, and funnel analysis to show you how users arrive, where they navigate, on which elements they’re more likely to click, and how you can use all of this information to drive more revenue from your website.

"PageSense rounds out the suite on our marketing front," said Vegesna. "There are one or two other applications coming on this front. But PageSense complements our marketing suite today and ties into our various other marketing applications to see how good a conversion you’re getting." Vegesna would not elaborate on additional marketing tools to come.

Heat maps specifically provide a visual overlay of how users click and scroll as they navigate your website. For example, if the heat map shows that your customers are navigating away from your most important product, then you should probably study their navigation patterns to best determine how to drive them back in that direction.

Funnel analysis shows you the order in which users arrive and navigate your site. You’ll be able to see the visitor count and drop-off from page to page. So, essentially, if your checkout process is a disaster, then the funnel analysis will show that users are placing objects in your shopping cart but dropping off before their purchase is completed.

Zoho PageSense is part of Zoho One so it integrates with all Zoho tools. But you can also connect the solution to Clicky, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, KISSmetrics, and Mixpanel. The platform is available for use in 15 languages, including Chinese, French, German, and Spanish. Subscriptions start at $29 per month for 10,000 monthly visitors.

3
Zoho Sites

Zoho has also rebooted Zoho Sites, its website builder. The new website builder is chock-full of modern-looking layout templates designed to compete with industry-leading website-building tools such as GoDaddy and Wix . Templates include Accordian, Box, Carousel, Heading, Icon, Image, Newsletter, and Tab—each of which can be dragged and dropped from the tool’s side navigation into the desired spot on the webpage editor.

Users can also add dynamic elements such as parallax images and videos to the background of a webpage to provide a more three-dimensional viewing experience. Additionally, whenever users add an element or a section to the website editor, a pop-up message offers them template-specific design and formatting options to customize the content layout and properties. This way, you’re not simply dragging and dropping common elements that other Zoho users will also add to their websites.

Zoho Sites comes in a basic, free plan. Paid subscriptions start at $5 per website per month for an annual subscription of the Essential Plan, and increases to $12 for the Professional Plan and $20 for the full-featured Ultimate Plan.

"The revamp was a long time coming," said Vegesna. "We have a million sites hosted on Zoho Sites. We’re setting a platform for the future."

"Everything was templatized before," he added. "You applied the template and that was all you got. Now, each template section can be customized. Each template has 30 to 40 varieties and each variety can be customized."

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